'Shazam for birdsong' Warblr will name that tweet

Most of us could probably distinguish the nightingale's jaunty song from the throaty cacaw of a crow, but could you identify a bird species by its call alone?

Birdsong is a mysterious language that brushes past most human ears imparting a certain sense of joy, but little real information about the beak from which it emerged. A new app called Warblr is set to change all that though, by helping novice twitchers identify a bird from the sound of its chirp.

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Like Shazam or SoundHound, Warblr records nearby bird song on your smartphone in order to analyse it in real time and identify the species according to chirp. The tech inside the app, however, is somewhat different to its musical counterparts, needing to make use of more sophisticated machine learning. To put it simply, deciphering bird song with its many varying speeds and cadences is a far more complex operation that deciphering the pattern of a song that remains consistently the same from play to play. "Even the simplest bird call sounds subtly different every time," explains Warblr cofounder and tech director Dan Stowell. "Our machine learning technology has to work with individual birds within different species, which often have a huge repertoire of songs and calls, with some species continuing to learn different songs throughout their life. Migratory birds have even been known to return from their winter haunts with new sounds picked up from overseas."

Stowell, along with Warblr CEO Florence Wilkinson, has developed the app with a grant from Queen Mary University London and is now turning to Kickstarter to raise another £50,000. The hope is to launch it in the spring -- when the birds start getting noisy in the mornings -- and use it to engage people everywhere with their local bird wildlife and aid conservation.

Initially the app will be UK-only, but the pair also hope to launch a North American version, before turning it into a long-term citizen science project. As people use the app to identify birds, they can agree for that data they've captured to be mapped using the geolocation capabilities of their phones. "This data will be made publicly available, allowing zoologists and ecologists to monitor species growth and decline, patterns of migration, and ultimately to aid conservation," says Wilkinson.

The overall aim of the app, however, is to encourage people to form a closer relationship with the nature around them using technology. "We want to get people outdoors, learning about the wildlife on their doorsteps; because we believe that this will make them want to protect it for future generations," says Wilkinson.